Beyond the Buzzword: Why Sustainability Is Not Enough

“Sustainable” is everywhere. Printed on coffee cups, stitched into clothing tags, headlined in corporate reports. But the word has drifted a long way from its original meaning. Decades ago, an international commission defined sustainable development as meeting present needs without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own (Brundtland Commission, 1987). Today the term is more commonly applied to practices that leave the underlying degradation unaddressed, decelerate it only marginally, or, in some instances, exacerbate it without repairing ecosystems and relationships. That distinction matters, because the systems we’re being asked to “sustain” are already carrying real harm: forests that have burned, waters that carry contamination, communities that have been displaced. Naming this clearly isn’t about assigning blame; it’s about being honest enough to imagine more regenerative approaches. It also invites us to consider whether there are other ways of understanding what it means to care for the world. 

Many Indigenous Peoples are not asking how to make development more sustainable. They are asking a different question altogether: how can we restore respectful relationships among humans, the living world, and future generations? For many Amazonian Indigenous Peoples, these relationships are not simply one dimension of sustainability—they are the foundation from which integral wellbeing emerges. Without respectful relationships, sustainability risks becoming a technical exercise rather than a way of sustaining life.

From this perspective, repairing our relationships with one another and with the more-than-human world is essential to addressing today’s interconnected global crises. Throughout this article, we explore how regeneration involves not only restoring ecosystems but also rebuilding relationships through care, reciprocity, and love. Along the way, we invite readers to deepen these reflections through a curated selection of films and documentaries from The Green Channel that bring some of these ideas to life.

The Problem with “Sustainable”

Sustainability, as many corporations use it, often signals restraint: using a little less, wasting a little less, harming a little less, rather than a commitment to repair. That gap between restraint and repair is what greenwashing quietly depends on. Industries from fast fashion to fossil fuels lean on the word to reassure the public while their operations change very little. “Sustainable” oil extraction is often described by critics as an oxymoron—a contradiction in terms—because they argue that the scale of land and water disruption is fundamentally at odds with the principles of sustainability (Brand, 2012). White Water Black Gold holds space for the gap between corporate messaging and the people living with its consequences, while Peace Out bears witness to how energy development and land use collide across northwestern Canada.

For many Amazonian Indigenous Peoples, however, the limitations of sustainability extend beyond corporate greenwashing. The challenge is not simply that some practices are unsustainable, but that dominant sustainability approaches often leave unquestioned the relationships and worldviews that have contributed to today’s ecological crises. Rather than asking how to make development more sustainable, Indigenous Peoples invite us to consider a different question: how can we restore respectful relationships among humans, the living world, and future generations? From this perspective, ecological restoration begins with relational restoration (Vásquez-Fernández & Ahenakew, 2020).

From Guilt to Collective Care

For years, the sustainability conversation has quietly placed responsibility onto individuals: recycle properly, choose the greener product, track your carbon footprint. It’s understandable that this can leave people feeling like they’re failing, even while doing their best. But a relatively small number of corporations and extractive industries continue to generate the overwhelming majority of global emissions and environmental harm. Individual care matters and deserves to be honoured, but it was never meant to substitute for the political and economic change needed to shift how resources are extracted, financed, and regulated.

This mismatch, between what individuals are asked to carry and what the crisis actually demands, is part of what fuels climate anxiety, grief, and a sense of powerlessness that deserve compassion rather than dismissal. System Update: Rebooting Our Future makes the case for transformative shifts in politics and economics, offering a wider container for this weight than individual guilt ever could. Feeling The Apocalypse sits honestly and gently with the emotional toll of watching a slow-moving crisis unfold. How to Boil a Frog offers a lighter way into an otherwise heavy subject, a reminder that humour, too, can be part of how we stay present with complex aspects.

Moving from guilt to collective care means recognizing that responsibility has never belonged to individuals alone. While our everyday choices matter, they unfold within larger social, political, and economic systems that shape what is possible. For many Indigenous Peoples, care is not simply something we offer in moments of crisis; it is an ongoing practice of nurturing respectful and reciprocal relationships among people, the living world, and future generations (Vásquez-Fernández & Ahenakew, 2020). From this perspective, sustainability is not achieved through isolated individual actions but through relationships of reciprocity and shared responsibility that extend across communities, institutions, and the more-than-human world. Collective care, then, does not replace personal responsibility; it gives it meaning by placing it within a broader web of relationships that can sustain life.

The Paradigm Shift

If sustainability asks us to hold steady, regeneration asks for something warmer and bigger: actively restoring degraded ecosystems, rebuilding soil, and designing systems that give back more than they take. The circular economy applies this same logic to production, aiming to design waste out of the system rather than accepting a linear take-make-dispose model as inevitable. The Future of Energy explores community-led transitions to renewable power, while Food and Fuel: A Story of Resilience looks at what resourcefulness can look like when scarcity, rather than abundance, is the starting point.

Amazonian Indigenous Peoples offer a parallel, and in some ways deeper, version of this shift, one rooted explicitly in love and reciprocity. Rather than treating land primarily as a resource to be managed, many Indigenous communities describe their relationship with the forest as one of ongoing respect: plants and trees are spoken with and asked permission before use, and rivers and animals are cared for as kin rather than commodities. This isn’t a metaphor for sustainability; it’s a different starting point altogether, one where restoring a relationship is the basis for restoring an ecosystem. For a regenerative economy to mean more than a marketing term, it may need to borrow this same premise: that repair is relational, held in trust and care, not only technical.

The Future is relational

Systemic change isn’t only a matter of solar panels and policy reform. It’s also about how gently and generously people relate to one another. Extreme individualism tends to fuel overconsumption and isolation, while strong community ties invite sharing, repairing, and collective decision-making, all of which ease the pressure on the planet and on each other. Talk About Lonely connects the loneliness epidemic to the broader climate conversation with real tenderness, while Haida Gwaii: On the Edge of the World shows a Canadian community choosing, together, to prioritize its natural environment over unchecked extraction.

If respectful relationships are the heart of sustainability, then sustaining those relationships becomes an ongoing practice rather than an environmental outcome. Relationships do not sustain themselves. They require continual care, reciprocity, accountability, and repair. The same is true of our relationships with the living world.

Conclusion

Perhaps sustainability has not failed because it asked too much of us, but because, over time, we asked too little of it. If sustainability is to remain meaningful, it cannot be reduced to consuming differently or producing more efficiently. It must return to its relational roots: sustaining the respectful relationships among people, the living world, and future generations from which all forms of wellbeing emerge. In that sense, regeneration is not an alternative to sustainability. It is what sustainability looks like when its relational heart is remembered. The root of sustainability is relationality. Once we forget that, sustainability becomes a buzzword. Once we remember it, sustainability becomes a living practice again.

To sit with these stories of hope, care, grief, resilience, and the people imagining something more regenerative, explore our curated collection of impact documentaries on The Green Channel.